WoW subscription report

WoW’s latest numbers have come out, and it’s dipped down to 9.6 million, below its ‘over 10’ from the last quarter. Without delving into the weasel words of it, that number and its chosen form of expression is a remarkable dip downwards when you use the perspective of any non-Warcraft MMO. Consider that this means since its peak, the game has lost about 2.4 million subscribers. City Of Heroes total lifetime subscriptions was maybe about 1.5 million, meaning that in two years, Blizzard lost about the population of Kosovo, something that the population of Kosovo have been trying to avoid for some time.

On the other hand, Blizzard’s peak numbers for World of Warcraft are still twelve million people, a number larger than the populations of Belgium, Greece, Haiti or Sweden, and that’s using the countries your average Warcraft player will have heard of.

Over the course of eight quarters, Blizzard have seen a population decrease of about 20%, which sounds a bit less of a heart attack, but it is a steady downward trend. It probably won’t happen this year, with Blizzard’s Diablo and Starcraft releases helping to steady the ship, and the mindblowing sales that retail expansions generate, but expect a major shift in how Blizzard monetize Warcraft in 2014.

2 Comments

  1. “We see that you’ve died! For the low price of one dollar, you may revive instantly, without any damage to your gear!”

  2. They’ll bring out more shiny pets for ten dollars a pop, and mounts for twenty dollars, and beyond that they’ll start offering services that people want for money even though they’ve been reluctant to before. Blizzard does all right, even with the decline in subs, because most of the people subscribing /do/ manage to make some of those micro-transactions throughout the course of their subscription and that always helps boost numbers.

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